Suttree(17)

Yessir.

One more holler out of you and you get no supper.

Yessir.

Nearby prisoners wore pinched faces, apparently in pain, eyes half shut with joy constrained. Harrogate followed on into a messhall like the one they’d come through. The benches and tables were filling up with prisoners. He sought out Suttree and sat next to him and fell to with his spoon. A great clanking and scraping throughout the hall and no word spoke. The table across from them was taken by black prisoners and Harrogate eyed them narrowly from under his brows, his head bent over his plate and the spoon he gripped like a trowel rising and falling woodenly.

When his group had all done eating the guard walked along behind them to the head of the table and rapped and they rose and filed back through the kitchen, scraping their plates into a slopcan and stacking them on a table, dropping their spoons into a bucket. Then they filed out through the other messhall, now partly filled with prisoners eating, and into the hall and up the stairs to their cell again.

They wasnt no meat, said Harrogate.

That’s right, said Suttree.

Do they ever have meat?

I dont know.

Have you ever eat any meat here?

You mean other than breakfast bacon?

Yeah. Other than breakfast bacon.

No.

Harrogate leaned against the bunk. After a while he said: How long you been here?

About five months.

They hell fire, said Harrogate.


It was dark when they rose in the morning and dark when they filed into the kitchen to get their plates and spoons and still dark when they turned out in the dewfall and grainy mist of the yard. He stood there with his sleeves and cuffs rolled two turns each and watched the men climb into the trucks. He looked for Suttree but by the time he saw him he was already in a truck and the door was shut. Some of the trucks started to pull away. A guard came over and looked down at him. He stooped with his hands on knees to see into his face. Who the hell are you? he said.

Harrogate.

The guard nodded his head as if this was the right answer.

Did you get your breakfast?

Sure did.

Feel like you’re ready for a day’s work do you?

I reckon.

Well we have a truck over here for you to ride in if that’s all right with you.

Thisn here?

Yeah. You dont care do you?

Harrogate grinned. Shoot, he said. I reckon that’s what all I’m here for. I’ll do just whatever.

Well we’re mighty pleased about that. We like for everbody to be happy.

Shoot, said Harrogate over his shoulder as he slouched toward the waiting truck. I aint hard to get along with.

As he reached the rear of the truck and put up one hand to help himself the guard fetched him a kick from behind that lifted him through the door and dropped him among the boots and shoes of the other prisoners. They looked down at him with crazed grins and someone jerked him forward by the collar in time to keep the door from slamming on his foot. A redheaded man leaned down and said: Get in here, idjit. You make that son of a bitch mad this early of the mornin and I’ll kick your ass myself.

I didnt know which truck I was supposed to go to.

Well no truck was the wrong one. Set over here. This son of a bitch drives like a drunk indian goin after more whiskey.

The truck coughed up gouts of white smoke and they lurched off into the fog down the hill and down the winding workhouse road to the highway where the taillights of the other trucks went by twos like eyes before them in the cool October dawn. The prisoners sat in rows facing each other, jiggling and rolling, some trying to sleep. Harrogate crouched on the bench with his hands beneath his thin legs and watched the floor. There was no conversation. The truck gained speed and the tires sang on the black road.

At the first stoplight a young girl was waiting for a bus at the edge of the road. The prisoners shoved and crowded at the wiremesh door of the truck. She turned to stare out over the barren lots toward houses swimming in the mist. A cold light was leaking across the landscape from the east. Harrogate watched two birds come out of the colorless heavens and alight upon a wire and look down into the truck and fly again. They went on, the driver’s eyes in a car come up behind them somewhat uneasy at the sight of these striped miscreants.

By good daylight they had crossed the north end of the county and were pulled up at a roadside where sewerpipe lay unjointed along a selvedge of red mud and where riders from the first truck had already descended into ditches and begun to swing picks. The sun rose and warmed them where they stood waiting tools and orders. A man handed Harrogate a pick, stepped back and studied him with it and took it away again. A few cars eased past, faces at the glass. Men bound for work in the city looking out with no expression at all. The prisoners shuffled and milled about until all had tools and Harrogate stood alone. He had started down into the ditch with naked hands when a guard called to him.